Mikhail Bakhtin is acknowledged in increasingly wide circles as a sensitive observer of popular culture in its socio-historical context. His acute study of the folkloric rituals of carnival—from the phallophors of epic Saturnalia, whose role was to joke and cavort obscenely, to the rogue comedians at turn-of-the-century country fairs—uncovers a vast and fertile dialogue of heteroglossia. Not only at the carnival but pervading all levels of language, Bakhtin identifies infinitely shifting heteroglottal strata made up of loosely bound generic wholes, subgeneric wholes, accents, systems, dialects, and constantly fragmented layers of language working together, or at battle, or at play. This dialogic scheme covers, in The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and His World, most epic drama and Russian and European nineteenth-century realist literature and invites its own extension into areas of recent Western popular culture.

Although Bakhtin insists that the novel is the key form of the...